The Unicorn Read Free

yet unlike…It occurred to her that here at last was something real and something perfect. Who said that, about perfection and reality being in the same place? Here was something which her consciousness could not wretchedly devour, and by making it a part of her fantasy make it worthless…the pictures were something real outside herself, which spoke to her kindly and yet in sovereign tones, something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreamy trance-like solipsism of her earlier mood. When the world had seemed to be subjective it had seemed to be without interest or value. But now there was something else in it after all.
     
This is a highly Platonic way of describing the effect of beauty, even if Plato himself doubted if art could achieve the sort of beauty required. It is in fact an excellent description of what is intended by the Greek and Russian Orthodox who inherit Platonic aesthetics through Byzantine art, in their icons. I once, I think, saw Iris reacting to an icon as Dora did to Gainsborough’s picture, and the moment must have been one of the seeds of The Unicorn. It was at Oxford in the early spring of 1962, when she had just ceased being my supervisor, and I asked her and John to dinner in Merton College. I had hanging in my sitting room a colour photograph of an icon not very well known in England at that time, and Iris had not known it, St. Andrew Rublev’s Hospitality of Abraham. It shows the three angels who, according to the book of Genesis, appeared to Abraham to announce the birth of Isaac, and to tell him of God’s counsels in the judgement of Sodom and Gomorrah. Christian tradition interprets them as a revelation of the Trinity, and it is the Trinity that Rublev depicts through the relation and gaze of the heads, not unlike Gainsborough’s daughters ‘round full buds, like yet unlike’, through a subtle combination of movement and stillness, of circle and triangle in the composition, and through something numinous in the colours, purple, blue, green and rose embraced and dominated by the gold of the angels’ wings. Iris leapt up on the table beside it like a little cat that sees prawns offered him, and examined it, wholly absorbed. Later she sent me a copy of The Unicorn, and a card saying that she had seen the original in the Tretyakov gallery in Moscow. Something like it is what Effingham sees in Hannah with Marian and Alice, drawn
     
together into a single fuzzy golden orb…The three angels were a radiant globe out of which light streamed forth…He looked up at Hannah and found himself suddenly able to see her quite clearly as if a light had been shone on her and as if the other two faces had been merged into hers leaving only one image.
     
I say ‘something like it’ because Rublev’s icon is in its own way deeply involved in history and story. The angels have behind them a house, a tree and a mountain which all play parts both in the story of Abraham and in the symbol system of the whole Bible, and in front of them a dish on which a little beast represents both the calf with which Abraham fed the angels and the Lamb of God, and so the story of Christ. Both here and in her use of the icon in a later novel, The Time of the Angels, Iris omits all this, perhaps because she wants the icon to be an epiphany and not a story, and the circle of gold to correspond to something holding the whole world together, and not to any history within it.
     
On the other hand, Effingham’s vision implicitly corresponds to one feature which Rublev is said to have been the first to introduce into the subject of the hospitality of Abraham. Abraham and his wife Sarah are not represented, so that the viewer takes the fourth place at the table with the angels, as Effingham does with the three women.
     
Stumbling, and somewhat full of whiskey, Effingham tries to relate what he sees before him to what he had seen in the bog the previous night, and to the teachings of his old tutor, Max